'Believe in yourself, the rest will follow': five trailblazing women you've never heard of

'Believe in yourself, the rest will follow': five trailblazing women you've never heard of

‘Be confident and believe in yourself, even if the world doesn’t, and the rest will follow’: Angel Vendeline Namshali, founder of a unique, female-run safari resort in Tanzania.
Photograph: Kathleen Prior

From the farmer’s daughter who set up the only safari resort in the world run solely by women, to the first female Dalit to win a seat in Pakistan’s parliament, women who have challenged stereotypes and refused to give in to fear or discrimination tell their stories.

Main image:
‘Be confident and believe in yourself, even if the world doesn’t, and the rest will follow’: Angel Vendeline Namshali, founder of a unique, female-run safari resort in Tanzania.
Photograph: Kathleen Prior

Angel Vendeline Namshali dresses in khaki with big, laced military boots on her feet. She is armed with nothing more than a walkie-talkie and torch, but the bush of Tanzania’s Serengeti is her second home.

“The bush has many challenges for women,” she says. “But of course we can do it.”

The daughter of a poor subsistence farmer, Namshali has established the only safari resort in the world run entirely by women. Last week, the camp climbed to second spot on TripAdvisor’s list of the best places to stay out of the 128 in the Serengeti.

Women will go the extra mile. You don’t have to say it twice, they are there, it gets done

Angel Vendeline Namshali

In a country where social norms dictate that women stay at home to care for their husbands and children, every one of her 22-strong team has overcome prejudices and resistance to work here at Tanzania’s Dunia camp.

From the guides to the chefs to security, the women take enormous pride in their achievements at grinding such stereotypes into the dust.

“It can be a real challenge here in Tanzania for women to join the tourism industry. Many owners of the big companies do not trust women. They think women cannot do much,” says Namshali. “Women do not get many opportunities. But if you give her a chance to work, she will do even better.”

Namshali grew up in a mud hut in the Usambara mountains, the third of six children. Her family are from the Pare tribe, an ethnic group indigenous to the Kilimanjaro region of northern Tanzania.

Namshali juggled her schoolwork with her duties of collecting the family’s firewood and water, always conscious of her father’s struggle to pay the school fees. Sometimes her mother would trade bags of maize or beans to pay for her lessons. She excelled in exams, but there was no money for her to go to college. With limited resources at his disposal, her father decided to educate her brothers instead.

Namshali’s first job was folding linen in a hotel, where she took the opportunity to learn English from foreign guests. Her spark and enthusiasm got her noticed and promoted.

When she got her first job in a safari resort with Asilia Africa, she was put in charge of a tented camp staffed entirely by men.

“Manage all these men, can you imagine?” Staff were initially resistant. “But they soon understood who was boss,” she says.

In 2016, Asilia Africa took the unprecedented decision to turn Dunia camp into the world’s first game lodge staffed entirely by females.

“At first, my father was in shock. He asked everyone to pray for me, living in the bush like an animal and only surviving by the grace of God!” says Namshali. “These days you hear him boasting that his daughter is a manager in the best company!”

More than a year into the project, guests have nothing but rave reviews. Though one burly gentleman, on being walked back to his tent by the night security guard, did query how this young lady armed only with a torch would help in the face of a snarling predator. Little did he know, a few months prior, the guard had frightened off an elephant bull who had stampeded the kitchen in search of watermelons, using nothing but pots and pans.

The team face sexism on a regular basis while at work. Namshali finds she is often disparagingly referred to as “woman manager” by her male peers. She has been told frequently to stop pretending, to go home and take care of her children and stop disrespecting her husband.

“As a woman, working in this kind of environment, you have to be very tough and very strong,” she says. “Be confident and believe in yourself, even if the world doesn’t, and the rest will follow.”

Namshali financially supports her teenage son and stay-at-home husband, a concept alien in Tanzania, where traditional gender roles dominate. All the women at Dunia work 45 days on site, followed by two weeks at home. At first, Namshali found it hard leaving her son for such long periods and they both used to cry, but now he understands his mother’s job provides for the whole family.

Namshali firmly believes tourism is creating a turning point for women in east Africa, and predicts there will be many more working in the hospitality industry, and in leadership roles, within the next five years.

“With women, they will go the extra mile. You don’t ever have to say twice, they are there and it gets done,” she says, with pride. “The women, they are Dunia!”

Fatima Zaman

As a young girl growing up in east London, she was at school close to Aldgate. “I heard the blast, I felt the ramifications,” she recalls. “I’m a young Muslim woman and I felt the personal effects of the stereotyping and the discrimination that followed those attacks. So at the age of 13, I decided that I wouldn’t let hate be my story.”

Anyone who wants to threaten me: bring it on! Because that pushes me to work harder

Fatima Zaman

Now 24, she calls herself a counter-extremist. “It’s not something that a young person usually chooses as her career,” she says. “It was a very personal choice. I was very young when I witnessed the 7/7 bombings.”

Zaman runs a schools’ roadshow under the Extremely Together programme, travelling across Britain to teach young people how to resist violent extremism, and to question hate and propaganda.

“I’ve had numerous occasions where I’ve actually been frightened by the extremists that I’m working to protect people from. The far right has attacked me. Islamists continuously attack me and my work, and they want to attack my community. It’s a very difficult thing, but I keep reminding myself that the extremists won’t stop, and if I let one piece of hate deter me then I’m not good at what I do.

“So every time I get a bit of discrimination, I get challenged. Anyone who wants to threaten me: bring it on! Because that just pushes me to work harder to make sure that there’s a positive alternative.”

Zaman emphasises that extremist organisations are very good at harnessing the power of social media. “It’s an infinite resource that lies unfettered and unchecked. In targeted campaigns they engage young people on things that they like and, once they’ve got that hook, they personalise it. They try to say, ‘You’re disenfranchised, you don’t belong. You’re British, you’re Bengali, you’re Muslim – there’s a clash of civilisations within you but we can offer you an alternative where you belong.’”

Zaman juggles her job as a civil servant with her activism. “It’s the passion that drives me. I’m not going to stop for as long as there is the ill of extremism, I can’t slow down.

“My mum is very supportive. She gave me my feminist values and just wants me to do good in the world.

“My family’s history is quite rich. My father helped to bring peace to Bangladesh during the war in 1971, and I think that’s where I get my activism from. It’s in my blood. With all that’s going on with the Rohingya community and the refugees, I need to go back and do something – I don’t know what yet, so watch this space! – but my culture is so important to me. I call myself a hybrid. I’m British and I’m Bengali. The two can co-exist. I can bring my experiences from the UK to Bangladesh, and my rich, diverse culture that defines my personality and who I am back to the UK.”

Krishna Kumari Kohli

In a remote Hindu-majority district of south-eastern Pakistan, the dark evenings of Krishna Kumari Kohli’s childhood were reserved for exhausted sleep rather than dreams of political office.

Kohli’s community had lived on the margins for centuries in South Asia as Dalits, “untouchables” on the lowest rung of the caste system.

Benazir Bhutto became Pakistan's first female prime minister in spite of threats and opposition. She is my role model

Krishna Kumari Kohli

Shackled to a life on the fields in Tharparkar, near the Indian border, Kohli and her family worked as bonded labourers, for harsh feudal landlords who dictated when they ate, slept and prayed.

This month, however, Kohli became the first female Dalit member of Pakistan’s Senate. The 39-year-old won a parliamentary seat reserved for women after being nominated by the Pakistan People’s Party.

In Pakistan’s 70-year history, a woman from a low-caste Hindu background has never reached this upper echelon of political power. In the Muslim-majority country, Dalits are entrenched in cycles of debt bondage, even children labouring in brick kilns or farms. Few are ever able to extricate themselves from the situation, making Kohli unique, although she disassociates herself from the institution of caste. “I believe in equality and brotherhood,” she says. “I reject the caste system.”

With no previous political experience, Kohli was an activist working in human rights and development. She plans to use her new position to advance women’s rights, tackle child marriage and end the forced labour she and her family endured.

Pakistan’s Hindus have celebrated her victory. “We are so happy,” says Kashi Ram, a 30-year-old priest in Lahore. “I am happy Hindus also have a position here in Pakistan,” he adds.

Now Kohli carries the hopes of such Hindus, most of whom live in her home Tharparkar district, a poverty and drought-stricken region where malnutrition and hunger are widespread. Kohli’s village, Dhana Gam, suffers a dearth of healthcare facilities and doctors, and waterborne diseases are rampant.

As a member of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Kohli says she walks in the footsteps of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2007. “She accepted the challenge and became the first female prime minister in spite of threats and opposition,” Kohli says. “Benazir Bhutto is my role model.”

Although Kohli has garnered attention for her Dalit background, the senator remains focused on her pledge to use the role to help women and minorities, and denounces all discrimination based on religion, caste, and gender. “Humanity is superior to everything,” she says. Kohli is not just a senator for Hindus or Dalits, she adds. “First, I am a Pakistani.”

Dina Meza

A farmer’s daughter from Cofradía, in north-west Honduras, Dina Meza took up journalism thinking that it might cure her crippling shyness. Two years into her studies, her brother Victor, a social activist, was kidnapped by the military, tortured and thrown in prison. She found her voice.

“I wasn’t conscious of the danger at that time,” says Meza, now an award-winning journalist and human rights defender. “My brother was accused of terrorism as a political prisoner. All I wanted to do was find him alive.”

We can’t have this evil continuing … I owe it to my children not to pass on the same Honduras I grew up in

Dina Meza

Victor Meza, who suffered terrible injuries in prison, was eventually released during a political amnesty in 1992, along with 17 fellow prisoners, thanks to a campaign by Meza and others.

In 2013, Meza, 55, was forced into exile in the UK, and was accepted on the University of York’s protective fellowship scheme for human rights defenders. The scheme, which celebrates its 10thanniversary this year, provides temporary respite. In January, as part of a Pen International writers’ event, she spoke about her determination to continue her work, despite threats against her.

To write in Honduras, she said, “is to write with a gun pointed at your head”.

“There is a saying in Honduras,” says Meza. “When you say you can feel the steps of a big animal, it means you can feel there’s going to be radical change.”

Her magazine is now translated into more than 20 languages.

She is founding president of Pen Honduras, which supports journalists at risk. The organisation has taken on cases of high-profile writers charged with defamation, and of students criminalised after protesting against reforms at their university.

Meza, who also founded the Association for Democracy and Human Rights, still receives terrifying death threats. In April last year she was followed on to a bus by a man who told her he was armed, and that there was an order out to kill her.

“I was so terrified,” she says. She managed to escape. But she now has a safety plan, which includes support from Peace Brigades International, an NGO that provides international observers to protect human rights defenders in danger.

Her country remains in political turmoil. On 27 January, President Juan Orlando Hernández was sworn in for a second term after winning a violently disputed election in which his party was accused of electoral fraud.

Meza says the UK, and the international community, should not be fooled by the Honduran government’s rhetoric. “If you are being fooled you are helping to sustain the impunity in the country.”

There is, she says, still much work to do in Honduras. “It’s very important to achieve change. We can’t have this evil continuing … I have a commitment to my brother, who was tortured and imprisoned, and also to my children. I owe it to them not to pass on the same Honduras that I grew up in.”

Sister Maria Loitaruk

In the three years since Sister Maria Loitaruk became head teacher of Bishop Caesar Mazzolari school, in Rumbek, South Sudan, pupil numbers have soared from 280 to 1,300.

This is no mean feat in a country where thousands have died, millions have fled their homes and two-thirds of the population are struggling to find enough food after last year’s famine.

In Rumbek, a farming town where feuds over dwindling cattle herds are fought to the death, and gunshots interrupt school lessons daily, education is seen as a low priority.

if you take your children to school, they will see life from a different angle. They will have ideas and grow

Sister Maria Loitaruk

“Life is very difficult here,” says Loitaruk, who grew up in a pastoralist community in West Pokot, Kenya. “War and drought and extreme poverty are part of their lives.”

What makes this Catholic nun most proud is that the school has achieved a gender split of almost half and half in a male-dominated, polygamous culture where 52% of girls are married by the age of 18 (and nearly one in 10 by the age of 15).

“I am seeing the way the girls are growing – knowing their rights, as girls, as women, as human beings,” she says. “And when they get back to the village, they are able to explain those rights to their mothers.

“Women in this community are submissive to their husbands, they are like property. Pastoralists value cows more than even human lives.”

South Sudan became the world’s newest country in 2011 but, within two years, fighting had broken out between members of the Dinka tribe, loyal to President Salva Kiir, and the Nuer tribe, supporting former vice-president Riek Machar.

Amid violence and drought, Loitaruk struggles to get parents to value education. Across the country, three-quarters of adults are illiterate, Unicef estimates, and many schools lie abandoned in the towns and villages.

Loitaruk visits families, telling her own story. As the youngest of eight, her father wanted her married off for a dowry of 100 cows. Her “unique” mother fought hard for her to be allowed to go to school.

“We visit the parents and talk to them about the value of education. I tell them of my own childhood,” she says.

“I tell them marriage can wait, but education cannot. I say the cows on which you are dependent, they will never pay to stabilise the economy of the country. If you leave a child at home idle or looking after cows, they will learn stealing and fighting. But if you take your children to school, they will see life from a different angle. They will have ideas and grow and help to stabilise the economy of the country.”

Living in such a violent, tribal culture, children face harsh, difficult lives, and Loitaruk pays tribute to those who want to become doctors, nurses and teachers.

“If a child is able to wake up and say, “I’m going to school”, that is an achievement,” she says. “If a child is able to follow the curriculum, that is an achievement. We shall do our best to help them.”